Home>How the health crisis is blurring lines between science, politics and society
06.05.2020
How the health crisis is blurring lines between science, politics and society
Since the beginning of the current health crisis, scientists have been in the spotlight, as governments rely on their recommendations to consolidate their decisions. Thus summoned as experts, also by the media, they find themselves both placed in collective responsibility, as is the case with the scientific council mobilised around the French government, and exposed individually. They also constitute a reference point for citizens to gradually build up an understanding of the situation. The role of science within society and in relation to the major political decisions that have to be made is thus extremely active, in various configurations, and subject to multiple pressures. What questions does this situation raise during the crisis? And what can be anticipated as longer-term consequences for the relationship between science and politics?
Climate and Biodiversity: an increasingly active role for science, not a substitute for politics
2015 marked a key moment for many climate scientists: moving from the era of warnings to the era of solutions. The three special IPCC reports published in 2018-2019 (on scenarios to limit the increase in global average temperature to +1.5°C; on the ocean and cryosphere and on land) and the IPBES Global Assessment Report on the state of the World's biodiversity confirmed this shift. In doing so, the political dimension of the scientists' voice became clearly evident. However, the key term of the institutions created for the science-policy interface at the global level, such as the IPBES or the IPCC, remains unchanged: policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive, i.e. showing the inevitable trade-offs (between the risks of inaction and the cost of action, for example), but without making a choice in the place of legitimate representatives.
However, it is not about sending scientists back to a form of neutrality. The discovery of unknown ecosystems is worth putting their need for protection on the agenda and is thus of an eminently political nature. Greta Thunberg's calls for action from political agents, the youth movement, the Extinction Rebellion, and the scientists themselves calling for civil disobedience also rely above all on science. In a long-term perspective, citizen science, through participatory construction of various configurations (data collection, definition of the scientific approach, dissemination of knowledge), also contributes to building science at the interface of society and (political) decision-making.
What seemed to be gradually building up around climate and biodiversity was familiarity, a custom of frequent contact between scientists, politicians and citizens. This custom had made it possible to apprehend the political roles of science in the service of a dynamic clarification of what we know and what we do not know. This is what the precautionary principle is all about: an incentive to act now, and an injunction to do more research, to continue to explore and understand. This familiarisation, although sometimes tense, notably because of the insufficient capacity for collective action in the face of scientific results, has allowed for a better understanding of the possible roles and postures of scientists in societies struggling with global transformations.
Scientists in Society: an ambiguous position challenged by the crisis
From a broader perspective than that of the environmental and climate fields, scientists might hold a particularly ambiguous position in the perception of citizens: they are trustworthy, in a general atmosphere of strong mistrust of institutions; and yet almost incapable of making their singular voice heard, a voice made up of method and transparency, in the permanent whirlwind of information and data, some of which is not referenced or manipulated, and which is accelerated by social networks.
In this context, the current health crisis and its management has suddenly put the spotlight on the functioning of scientific expertise, in a way that is quite clearly in contrast to what had been built up around environmental and climate issues, opening up at least three types of questioning.
The first question is very well illustrated by the posture of medical expertise as mobilised by the public authorities, in the classic role of adviser to the political decision-maker (cf. the scientific council around the President of the French Republic). This figure, reassuring through its collegiality, guaranteeing the pluralism that is essential for the quality of expertise, and independent of political decision-making and its final responsibility, makes it possible to consolidate the authority needed to move forward in times of crisis, but nevertheless inevitably interferes with two other issues. The first of these is the dynamic process of science at work, which is ongoing, with all the difficulties of imperfect data, (the collection of which is itself evolving) and the tensions between an empirical approach without an optimal experimental set-up and the need for scientific validation (cf. Prof. Raoult's activities on chloroquine). The second comprises the risks of excluding non-specialists, users of health services, patients and citizens from the construction of scientific expertise itself in the management of an extremely rapidly evolving crisis. It is essential that citizens directly concerned by this crisis, even beyond the sick, have access to the expertise at hand, particularly to anticipate and evaluate the impact of crisis management measures on our lives, and so as not to convey (again) the image of an expertise disconnected from society.
The second question relates to the knowledge presented in economic matters, more broadly to the capacity for ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of the impacts of the crisis and the measures taken, and to the credibility of these evaluations, which are indispensable and yet extremely uncertain. Science will also have to ward off attempts at taking over benefits in a nationalist fashion, which is already emerging today. The international institutions of science (the academic community and its journals and conferences) and of expertise (around the WHO, for example) have the function of ensuring the best possible objectification, but care must be taken to guarantee this independence.
The third questioning comes from the role assigned to ecological scientists, invited by the media to help citizens understand the very complex causes of a health crisis rooted in humanity's relations with other compartments of living things. It is essential, albeit an enormous challenge, to listen to the scientific communities in a precautionary manner, at a time when they are called upon to describe a planetary ecosystem of which we are only a tiny part and of which our knowledge, while progressing incredibly rapidly, is still extremely partial. Scientific ecology nevertheless has its full place, alongside virology, microbiology, epidemiology, geography and other disciplines in the scientific work carried out by multidisciplinary teams and published in the most renowned journals. As a matter of fact, it has very well-informed causal links between ecological dynamics and pandemic risks. Scientific ecology in relation to medicine has developed the concept of "One Health" to unify the issues of ecosystem health, veterinary health and human health: in doing so, it is in fact upsetting not only the arrangement of these scientific disciplines among themselves, but also the forms of organisation in our societies, and we have not yet been able to take measures or act accordingly. We are now thinking about the changes we would need to make in industrial livestock farming systems, in our relationship with wildlife and international trade, in particular, and all this would need to be driven by a unifying strategic vision. We are far from such a system and, above all, far from knowing how to interact with the scientific communities so that together, citizens, politicians and scientists, we can keep our eyes wide open to our planet and to what we do not yet know.
These three questions will interact in the relationship between our societies, our scientists and our politicians, and the combination of their effects can be dizzying. The capacity for global cooperation between scientific communities, which is especially visible in the medical field at the moment but equally vibrant in the areas of climate and biodiversity, is a key resource for scientific institutions and researchers to find their role in these times of upheaval. There have been many calls for the construction or mandating of institutions of scientific expertise to explicitly define these interfaces, and to ensure that their mandate carries out a strategic response to each of the issues raised in this blogpost. This is indeed essential, as can be seen with the IPBES and the IPCC. But the relationships between science, policy and society also develop in the interstices and in individual interactions, and this will require constant attention from each of these fields and individuals.
Article by Sébastien Treyer, Executive Director of IDDRI. This article was originally published on the IDDRI website.
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